oer rapid innovation
DESCRIPTION
This is an introduction to the reusable technology solutions developed by the rapid innovation projects of the UK OER Programme during 2012. Bidders were asked to address problems identified through the Programme, and 15 UK university-based projects were awarded between £13,000 and £25,000 each over 6 months. They have developed a range of solutions to enhance the digital infrastructure to support open content in an educational context. Projects worked in an open innovation way, blogging as they went, working with peers and users, and the outputs are all open source, documented and reusable. Links are provided to each project output. Slides created by JISC: Programme Manager Amber Thomas, Programme Office Alicja Shah, Technical Advisory JISC Cetis particularly Martin Hawksey. Dandelion Clock sourced through flickr and attributed on the front slide.TRANSCRIPT
15 REUSABLE TECHNICAL SOLUTIONS FOR OER
developed by the UK Open Educational Resources Programme Phase Three: Rapid Innovation Strand
Image: Nerdegutt http://www.flickr.com/photos/nerdegutt/3584415133
Slides Amber Thomas, JISC. Acknowledgements:Alicja Shah, JISC for slide designMartin Hawksey, JISC Cetis for technical advisory
enhancing digital
infrastructure for open content
problems to solvehow to create rich machine-readable
resources that contribute to the global content
commons?
how to enrich and manage audio-visual content
in an educational context?
how to simply and cheaply host
and display content?
how to bring OER content closer to the everyday life of academics?
how to make use more visible to aid discovery and decision making?
OER Rapid Innovation Strand is part of the JISC and Higher Education Academy UK Open Educational Resources Programme. The Strand ran from March to October 2012.
15 small and short projects (£10k - £25k each) were funded to produce technical solutions supporting open content in education. The projects all blogged their progress and have made their solutions reusable.
OER ProgrammeOER Rapid Innovation
Programme Page
background
open innovation + open source + open standards = reusable solutions
Introducing ...15 TECHNICAL SOLUTIONS
SOLUTIONS NEEDED
how to create rich machine-readableresources that contributes to the
global content commons?
The Teacher Training Resource Bank (TTRB) was a web based resource that aimed to be a one-stop portal for education academics and professionals to gain evidence informed briefings that are authoritative, credible, relevant and timely. In 2010 the materials were archived and were difficult to access in any meaningful way. The project has begun to make the archive available again using OER approaches.
TTRB3 Engaging with the Evidence for Teaching and Learning comprises 250 articles and case studies about education, cleared under the UK Open Government Licence (compatible with Creative Commons Attribution), marked-up and tagged, available through a choice of RSS feeds, and ultimately with rich usage data.
Visit project blog
Watch a short video
Access TTRB3
CAMILOE: Collection and Management of Intriguing Learning Objects
Maxtract is a tool for converting PDF into formats such as LaTeX, MathML and text. It provides translation services into standard mathematical markup languages and adds accessibility to mathematical documents on multiple levels.
Maxtract produces output compatible with web browsers, screen readers and tools such as copy and paste, which is achieved by enriching the regular text with mathematical markup.
The output can also be used directly, within the limits of the presentation MathML produced, as machine readable mathematical input to software systems such as Mathematica or Maple.
Download MaxTract
Visit project blog
MaxTract Improving Accessibility to Mathematics
Opened up 8 courses in the Landmap Learning Zone through Creative Commons BY-NC-SA and redesign the Learning Zone area of the Landmap website, linking through to the ELOGeo repository at Jorum.. Visit project blo
g
Breaking Down Barriers: Georesources and OER
Transferred the hosting of the ELOGeo repository to Jorum from University of Nottingham ensuring the sustainability of the ELOGeo Project outputs.
Visit project blog
.
SupOERGlue: supporting rich remixing
Open Tapestry is a web tool previously known as OERGlue. Open Tapestry supports LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability) integration which allows us to seamlessly link the Dynamic Learning Maps (DLM) system into it.
If a user has an Open Tapestry account they can access their snippets from Open Tapestry and use them to create a mash-up resource in DLMs which could then be stored locally. This is similar to how Open Tapestry interact with Canvas LMS.
SOLUTIONS NEEDED
how to simply and cheaply host and display content?
RedFeather is a lightweight server-side script from the ePrints/Humbox family that fosters best practice OER sharing without the overheads associated with the installation and use of a full-scale repository platform. By eliminating the need for complex server infrastructure and emphasizing a concise, simplified workflow, RedFeather provides an out-of-the-box solution for users wishing to quickly annotate their OER and make them available in a variety of formats (including HTML, RSS, RDF and JSON).
Visit project blog
.
Preview software
Red Feather is for:- The small project- The solo sharer
Red Feather
The Bebop project is an extended use of BuddyPress, which can be installed onto over hosted WordPress blogs. Bebop provides web developers with a flexible way for staff to update and maintain their professional profiles. By processing data from a number of sources, web managers can re-presented it in a way that helps improve the corporate website, helps validate and update existing data about staff, and mandates staff to use a social networking tool in order to maintain their public, professional web presence.
Visit project blog
.
Preview software
Plug-in to enhance BuddyPress profiles over hosted WordPress blogs
The Bebop plugin provides a way for staff to link to teaching resources which they are publishing on a number of platforms and aggregate them into their staff profile, alongside information about their research and other professional responsibilities.
Bebop
SOLUTIONS NEEDED
how to enrich and manageaudio-visual content
in an educational context?
Imagine how difficult it would be to use a textbook if it had no contents page, index or page numbers. Synote provides the way to find or associate notes with a particular part of a recording,i.e. the media fragments.
The project designed and developed the Synote web application suitable for mobile technologies. This provides users with the ability to access, search, manage and exploit video and audio OER whilst on the move. Learners, teachers and other users can create notes, bookmarks, tags, links, images and text captions synchronised to any part of a recording, such as a lecture.
Access Synote
Visit project blog
Browse Synote Recordings for a lecture series
Synote Mobile
This project takes a linked data approach to aggregation of OERs and other online content in order to improve the ‘usefulness’ of online resources for education.
‘Autokitty’ is an open-source application which uses linked data approaches to present a collection of pedagogically related resources, framed within a narrative created by either the teacher or the students. The ‘collections’ or ‘narratives’ created using the tool will be organised around playback of rich media, such as audio or video, and will be both flexible and scalable.
This tool extends the established SIMILE Exhibit web application framework and the tools developed collaboratively between the SIMILE team at MIT and the ESRC/EPSRC ‘Ensemble‘ project in the UK.
Visit project blog
Preview the software
Watch a short
video
Linked Data Approaches to OERs
The project used speech-to-text technologies to automatically create transcripts of lectures in order to generate keywords which will help with the indexing, description and discovery of the lectures.
SPINDLE created a program that automatically filters the uncorrected transcript to a set of statistically interesting keywords. The program analyses the lecturer’s words and compares them with the British National Corpus of Spoken Words. Better keywords improve the discoverability of open content !
SPINDLE created a “captioning” toolset to help media producers deal with cataloguing media. With this toolkit, a media service can now:- batch process recordings to create transcripts automatically (using the free toolset CMU Sphinx)- generate keywords- correct any transcript errors while listening to the media- and export into time-coded captioning and archive formats
Preview the software
Visit project blog
Watch a short video
SPINDLE: speech > text > keywords > captions
The Attribute Images project has extended the Xpert Attribution service by creating a new tool that allows users to upload images and have a Creative Commons attribution statement embedded. This removes the reliance on images stored in Flickr, and puts the power to attribute specific images into the hands of the user.
Visit project blog
Automatically embedding open licences simplifies content development, removes barriers to repurposing and publishing OER, and substantially increases the usability of open content. Automating licence attribution also enhances digital literacy around the use of third-party images, as the tool enables best practice in relation to attribution to be followed.
The tool is available as part of the Xpert site, providing access to an immediate and established user group. It also has an API allowing developers to make use of the service in other sites.
Use the tool (beta)
Attribute Image
SOLUTIONS NEEDED
how to bring OER content closer to the everyday life of academics?
Visit project blog
.
Preview software
RIDLR: paradata for curriculum maps
In RIDLR tests the release of contextually rich paradata via the JLeRN Experiment to the Learning Registry and harvest back paradata about prescribed and additional personally collected resources used within and to augment the MBBS curriculum, via the Dynamic Learning Maps system, to enhance the experience of teachers and learners.
Visit project blog
.
View short video
Portfolio CommonsStudents and staff at the University of the Arts London who use the e-Portfolio system (based on Mahara) will be able to select content from their personal portfolio collection attach Creative Commons licences to that content and then publish to the open web using 2 different repository systems as publishing platforms:• Jorum (http://www.jorum.ac.uk/)• Filestore (http://alto.arts.ac.uk/filestore/)They will be able to do this without leaving their e-Portfolio.
This means the content they publish in this manner will be retained in the long-term after they leave the UAL and their e-Portfolio system is closed.. Because the content has been deposited in institutional and national repository services users will be able to reference the content in the future in their CVs for professional purposes.
Visit project blog
.
Preview software
Xenith: adding html5 export to the Xerte tool suite
Developers of rich, interactive learning materials are increasingly challenged to deliver content to a wide range of devices. The project has added HTML5 delivery capability to Xerte Online Toolkits with significant benefits for its user community.
Content developers will be able to exploit emerging pedagogies for a variety of devices. Xerte Online Toolkits facilitates simple publication and licensing of content via the Xpert repository. HTML5 will help improve discoverability.
SOLUTIONS NEEDED
how to make use more visible to aid discovery and decision
making?
View short slidecast
.
View short info video
Track OER
Get the code
Track OER has developed ways to help keep track of Open Educational Resources. OER have the challenge of being in the open and so actually what happens to content can become a bit of a mystery –- if content is trackable then we can improve what we know about use, help increase the evidence base and make it easier for those who want to reuse content to do the right thing.
The project has produced:• A transferable tracking system
combining the Cut and Paste “CaPRéT” software built by MIT in a previous JISC project
• A way to add tracking code to downloads so that we can see where new copies are being used and served
• Tools to help apply tracking.
Visit project blog
.
Get the code
SPAWS: sharing paradata across web stores
Building on the Learning Registry and Activity Streams SPAWS connected together several web app stores aimed at sharing web widgets and gadgets. Each time a user visits a store and writes a review about a particular widget/gadget, or rates it, or embeds it, that information is syndicated to other stores in the network.
We would love to hear about you using these tools and recipes! Let us know: Join our discussion list
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/ukoer3/rapidinnovation
15 REUSABLE TECHNICAL SOLUTIONS FOR OER